Yahoo reports that Activision filed a lawsuit against Double Fine, developer of the Jack Black-fueled Brütal Legend, on Wednesday to “stop the release” of the game. The mega-publisher claims to have invested “roughly $15 million” into the game’s development and that “it still has a valid contract to release the game,” despite Double Fine transferring rights to Electronic Arts late last year.

Last February, Electronic Arts responded to Activision’s saber rattling saying, “We doubt that Activision would try to sue. That would be like a husband abandoning his family and then suing after his wife meets a better looking guy.” Yeah …

So, to recap:

1. Sierra is subsumed into Activision, following the Activision Blizzard merger
2. Activision drops much of Sierra’s lineup, including Brütal Legend
3. Brütal Legend looks for another publisher, but Activision is “blocking the process”
4. EA Partners swoops in as the game’s new publisher
5. Activision sues Double Fine (that’s this post)

What are your thoughts on this? Personally, I think this comic sums it up perfectly.

I want to really make a change here, but I can’t do it alone. I’m not a coder, or a graphic designer — I’m just a lowly unknown writer. I’m going to need some help to get some attention. Anyone want to help design a logo and design a layout for the twitter page and the blog?

Update: Aftering thinking some more about what I’d like to accomplish, I may also need some help from a web designer and I’m going to try to figure out how to start a forum for discussion. Eventually I want to be able to have people come to the site, put their name and email address into a form, and then click a button which sends out an executive email carpet bomb to Activision execs on their behalf. I bet they’d listen to a few hundred of those.

This is just a rough mission statement until I have more time to work with this.

Who We Are:

A bunch of pissed off gamers!

What We Want:

Activision Blizzard to stop buying companies and killing off promising new franchises, and to stop whoring out their existing franchises. Really eight Hero games in one year is too much.

What we’re doing:

We will not make a new purchase of a single Activision title or item of Downloadable Content. Used is fine, because Activision doesn’t make a dime on these, and we understand that we can’t stop all of their purchases so we’ll buy their used copies. This is a win-win situation for us because we get to legally play the games we want and not have a cent go into Activision’s pockets.

We’ll stop when:

Activision releases three or more titles during a calendar year that is of a new, original franchise (licensed titles do NOT count), and Activision shows a good commitment into not treating its fans like sheep by releasing over-priced expansion packs as fully-priced retail products (Guitar Hero, as an example).